Sniff Wi-Fi

Voice over WiFi is scary.  Retries, packet errors (due to lots of Retries) and high latency (usually due to packet errors that happen because of lots of Retries) will murder a WiFi network's ability to handle Voice and leave your users screaming (not actually screaming) like they were cast in a horror movie (or, at the very least annoyed like a character from Office Space).  But there's one thing that sometimes scares people, but really shouldn't: Voice Arbitration.  It's not going to kill your WiFi voice calls.  In fact, it will almost certainly help. Arbitration is a process defined in the 802.11 standard .  Every device (client/station and AP) goes through it. The simplest way I can describe 802.11 Arbitration is like so: If your AP or station has heard a quiet channel for 37 microseconds (0.000037 seconds), then your AP or station transmits a frame (what most people call a packet, but I call a frame). If your AP or station has been hearing a busy ch...

I defend Apple a lot.  When Network World wrongly accused  the original iPhone of flooding Duke University's network, I defended Apple .  (It was later found to be a Cisco problem.)  When a health care provider I was doing some work for blamed SIP-enabled iPhones for a VoIP problem, I eventually found out that the APs were to blame .  (The APs were failing to respond to WiFi frames tagged as "Background" QoS.)  Time and time again networking folks blame device makers like Apple, and time and time again the problem ends up being the network. There are times, however, when it really is Apple's fault.  When the network is operating just fine.  This is one of those times.  The problem is that I just don't know why. 802.11n (HT) and 802.11ac (VHT) networks operate in co-existence with first generation (802.11a/b/g, that is) WiFi a lot.  When that happens, the HT or VHT access point o...